Write Around the Clock
By Becky Rodia, Senior Editor

At four o'clock in the morning, most of us are dozing in our warm beds, our days full of myriad interactions and tasks to be completed still ahead of us. For New Paris, OH teacher Charley Hoce, however, life is a little different.

Four a.m. is Charley's regular wake-up. He begins his day with half an hour of exercise, and then spends a full hour working on small wonders such as:

From the Diary of an Escaped Sheep
I went under the fence this morning
No one knows where I am
I love the freedom that I've found
I'm a sheep that's on the lam.

Charley Hoce is a poet. A real-live, write-every-day, rewrite-until-it's great poet. He has seven or eight book-length manuscripts of children's poetry completed, one of which - Beyond Old MacDonald - will be published by Wordsong/Boyds Mills Press in 2005.

Hard work pays off for this self-described morning person. After writing for an hour, and serving as "the best alarm clock in the world" for his wife Joanele (a former classroom teacher who is now the county's Director of Curriculum, Instruction and Professional Development), he's off to National Trail Elementary School to turn his attention to his other passion - teaching.

On the trail to an education. By 8:30 a.m., Charley's waiting at the entrance of National Trail Elementary School, where he has taught for his entire 22-year teaching career. About 40 of National Trail's 450 K-4 students arrive by car, and Charley's there to greet them every morning.

National Trail School is an enormous K-12 building with two "arms." National Trail High School is in the central part of the building, while the 5-8 middle school and the K-4 elementary school each form one of the "arms." There are approximately 1,200 students in the entire building.

Charley spends his days in the elementary school, teaching reading and writing to first, second and third graders in their own classrooms, as well as Title I kids who come out of those classrooms.

Rising to the challenge. Once the 9:00 a.m. bell rings, Charley spends the first hour of the day working with Title I students in grade-level groups of 5-6 kids per group.

"I've always had second and third grade, and I've always been good at making kids better readers," Charley said. "Getting first graders was a shock. Some of them have no idea how to read. It's a developmental thing they have to go through, a maturity thing.

"A couple of years ago, I went back to school and got my reading endorsement, so I've been using those skills with these kids. It's a challenge, but I enjoy it."

Hugh Aukerman, National Trail's K-5 principal, feels that Charley's up to the challenge. "He's a fantastic reading teacher and he's great with the kids," Hugh told us.

All of this became clear as we watched Charley with a group of first graders. He kept up an energetic patter that engaged the kids' attention as they built word families and used the words in oral sentences. Half an hour later, that group left, a new group came in and the cycle repeated, with Charley just as enthusiastic as he'd been with the first group of kids.

Learning from a pro. At 10 o'clock, we followed Charley next door to Amy Medaris' first grade classroom, where Charley helps teach a writing process that includes peer editing. He showed us a folder full of peer-edited drafts, featuring students' suggestions and actual proofreader marks. Then we got to hear him remind the class about how to be a good peer editor.

"Sometimes, when you're peer recommending," he told them, "you might want to take somebody's word out. But, be careful. You might hurt that person's feelings if you start marking out whole sentences. You know, when I give my writing to other people and they come back and say, åMr. Hoce, this isn't any good at all!' it makes me feel bad. But if they come back and say, åYou know, Mr. Hoce, this is pretty good, but why don't you think about changing this and this?' that makes me feel a lot better."

Some of the people to whom Charley gives his writing are instructors and colleagues at workshops he has attended, such as the Ohio Writing Project (a local site of the National Writing Project professional development program) and the Chautauqua Children's Writer's Workshop. At these events, Charley's work is "peer edited" and he gets valuable feedback from other teachers and writers. This interaction with the teaching and writing communities keeps Charley energized and augments his innate talent; he's a real pro, and the kids obviously benefit.

For one thing, they definitely had a handle on constructive critiquing. As they paired off and began editing one another's work, one girl told her partner, "I marked that spelling word on your paper because you know Mrs. Medaris would have marked it once she saw it."

During class, Charley also imparted advice about where to get ideas for writing, with the help of one of the first graders. When the girl told Charley she was going to write about the tooth she lost the previous day, Charley enthused: "Everybody, I was there yesterday when she lost her tooth in the lunchroom. And you know what? When she was sitting there with the bloody paper towel on her mouth, I thought 'Oh, that would be a great story.' And look what she did! She's going to write a story about her tooth, because we're always writing about the things we know."

Rewrites and early nights. After a morning full of peer editing and read-alouds, Charley is on lunchroom duty from 11:30 to noon, and then he gets a half hour for lunch - during which he doesn't eat.

"I'm not hungry during lunch," Charley said, laughing. "OK, I do eat a little, but not in the teacher's lounge because I spend my lunch time working on revisions of my poems."

After that half-hour writing break, Charley has half of his planning time until 1:00, when he teaches another class. Then he takes the other half of his planning time, and the rest of his afternoon is filled with more classes. By 3:10, it's time for Charley to station himself at the school's door once again, to keep an eye on things as the students leave for the day.

Charley leaves school by 4:00 p.m. and, after some family time with Joanele and their 16-year-old son, C.J. (a student at National Trail High School), he's in bed by 9:00.

"C.J. would tell you it's actually 8:30," Charley laughed. "But usually I'm in bed by nine because I get up so early. I never write at night."

Routine and inspiration. And there you have it. By keeping a consistent schedule of an hour of writing and a half-hour of revision each day, skillfully integrated with his family life and full-time teaching career, Charley Hoce has polished enough poems for more than half a dozen complete poetry collections. Some people have asked Charley to consider what his poetic output could be if he took a leave of absence from teaching, but he says that's not an option.

"I use the energy I get from the kids," Charley said. "They give me ideas, and I use a lot of the words they use. They do so many things that strike me funny. My worst time to write is in the summer, because I don't have the structure of the school routine, or the inspiration from the kids."

That inspiration is channeled into rhythmic wordplay such as:

Farm Family
My mother patches all my jeans
My grandma makes my clothes
But when he's on a tractor
My dad's the one who sows.

Charley Hoce does some sowing himself. Like a real farmer, he gets up early to tend to the poems germinating in his head. He spends his days cultivating kids' reading and writing skills and teaching them to love those activities as well. His complementary crops of poems and the readers who enjoy them are growing steadily and strong.

For more of Charley Hoce's poetry, click on Your Green Pages.

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March 2004, Vol.35, No.6